FIXED (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Fixed, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2025

As cute and loveable as dogs are, there's the flip side to their nature. Dogs are, after all, animals with base needs and natural instincts that sometimes fly in the face of how adorable they can be. Fixed, co-writer/director Genndy Tartakovasky's animated comedy, initially plays with that dichotomy, but eventually, the filmmaker lets the gross and the ribald take over this material.

It's amusing, for example, to first meet Bull (voice of Adam Devine, doing his best Jack Black impersonation for some reason), a stray mutt in the window of a pet adoption event. The family that will take the pup home is instantly smitten with the little guy, and Tartakovasky's hand-drawn animation style, honed over a couple decades on television, makes us see why. Even when the dogs here are talking about—or eating—poop and discussing sex and ripping a poor little squirrel to pieces, their appearance—big eyes and floppy paunches and wagging tails—remains somewhat endearing.

The punch line to that opening, which essentially becomes the single joke of the entire movie, comes with a transition to Bull's life two years later. We find him mid-hump on sleeping grandma's leg. It's quite the hump, to be sure—clingy and rhythmic and, in a very funny physical gag, getting a running start when things become too routine for the pooch. Grandma wakes up, though, sending Bull looking for something—anything, really—to help him finish his business.

From there, the rest of the story more or less revolves around Bull trying to achieve some kind of completion in his humping, because his owners are planning to have him neutered. He realizes this because all of his canine friends, namely boxer Rocco (voice of Idris Elba) and dachshund Fetch (voice of Fred Armisen) and beagle Lucky (voice of Bobby Moynihan), have had that procedure done to them. The signs are apparent: The dog's owners give their animal friend anything it wants, feed it food it shouldn't be eating, and fill the toilet with sugary-drink mix. When Bull sees that unfold in front of him, he decides to toss aside his collar and run away from home to live a wild and free life with his testicles still attached.

There's little else to say of the story, since it basically takes the traditional plot of talking animals on an adventure and does little with it, and there's only a little more to say about the movie's humor. Much of it involves the dogs wanting to have sex. Some of it has to do with canines peeing and pooing anywhere they want to, as well as the typical joke that it must be quite the power fantasy to watch a human pick up their business.

The dogs get into a fight with a gang of stray cats, with the two groups hating each other for no particular reason but primal instinct, and then, there is the scene where the gang of pooch pals chase a helpless squirrel through the city. The bloody mess that results is shocking, because the screenplay, co-written by Jon Vitti, hasn't really prepared us for grisly violence, what with all the scatological and sexual jokes. That makes the gag, as brutal as it is, funny, simply because it is a surprise, as well as how a couple of the dogs react to realizing they possess that kind of behavior somewhere inside them.

There really aren't many other surprises to be found here, either in the story or joke department. The plot, in addition to the city-roaming adventure, also includes Bull's infatuation with neighbor show dog Honey (voice of Kathryn Hahn), an Afghan hound with flowing golden locks of fur, but her owners have plans to breed her with Sterling (voice of Beck Bennett), an arrogant show dog. This also means a scene in which the runaway dogs infiltrate a dog show, are mistaken for prize pooches, and cause plenty of chaos.

The climactic scene, apart from an awkward display of self-sacrifice that's uncomfortably bordering on sexual assault, might be the one set in a dog brothel. After watching the same joke play out again and again, it's difficult to imagine that an entire house that revolves around that same joke could possibly surprise. Sometimes, one's assumptions are correct, because the scene is just more and more of the same, only on a bigger scale and with a greater number of random dogs participating in a building-wide orgy (The one clever bit in the sequence is a little pup who acts like a dominatrix of sorts, commanding her clients to sit and play dead).

For what it's worth, the animation, which looks exactly like something that could be found in a kid-friendly movie or TV show, is quite good—not to mention refreshing, in an era when hand-drawn animation is so rare that its appearance is noteworthy. It also at least keeps the basic joke of Fixed—that the look of the movie is very inappropriate for its inappropriate content—alive. Once the movie reveals that joke, there's nothing much else to get here.

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